http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,589660,00.html
An imperial nightmare
The new appetite for intervention will only increase the likelihood of
anti-western terror
Seumas Milne
Thursday November 8, 2001
The Guardian
Britain has yet to come to terms with its imperial record. A fog of
cultural amnesia about the the country's recent colonial past pervades
the debate about its role in the world today.
The 20th century, it was often said in the run-up to the millennium,
had been a century of bloodshed and tyranny, with the Nazi genocide
and Stalinist terror regularly paired as the emblematic twin horrors
of the era. The modern school history curriculum reflects a similar
perspective. But when it comes to the role of colonialism and its
aftermath, British reactions are usually cloaked in embarrassment or
retrospective pride about a legacy of railways and "good governance".
There is precious little acknowledgement of the relentless and bloody
repression that maintained a quarter of the world's population under
British rule until barely half a century ago. Nor is there much
awareness of the hundreds of thousands who died in continual
rebellions across five continents, or from forced labour and torture
in prison camps such as the Andaman islands, let alone the ubiquitous
racist segregation or deliberate destruction of economic prosperity in
places like Bengal. It is less than 50 years since British soldiers
were paid five shillings for each Kenyan they killed, nailed the limbs
of Mau Mau fighters to crossroads posts and had themselves
photographed with the severed heads of Malayan guerrillas. But
- as with other former colonial powers, such as France and Belgium -
there has been no public settling of accounts, no pressure for
colonial reparations or for old men to be tried for atrocities carried
out under the union flag.
One consequence of this national failure to face up to the reality of
Britain's impact on the world has been a casual enthusiasm for a
latter-day revival of the imperial project. What began as an almost
playful attempt at historical revisionism by rightwing pundits on both
sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990s has, since September 11,
flowered into a chorus of full-throated calls for the US and its
allies to move from the informal imperial arrangements of the postwar
era to the imposition of direct "international colonial" rule on rogue
states. The argument has been most forcefully advanced by the Oxford
history professor Niall Ferguson, currently filming a television
series on the history of the British empire. But his passion for a new
imperium - restrained only by a fear that the Americans may not have
the appetite for the task in hand - is far from unique. Among others
pressing for a modern imperial renaissance are the novelist and critic
Philip Hensher, who suggested a viceroy be appointed to run
Afghanistan, while the polemicist Mark Steyn insisted that compared
with the current system of relying on corrupt and dictatorial regimes
like Saudi Arabia to protect big power interests, "colonialism is
progressive and enlightened".
Such voices could be more easily dismissed as nostalgic mavericks were
it not for the fact that they reflect a far broader emerging consensus
in favour of intervention against recalcitrant governments, UN
protectorates and the imposition of western norms through legal and
economic restraints on national sovereignty. This is the "doctrine of
international community", first championed by Tony Blair during the
Kosovo war, with its echoes of the liberal imperialism of the 1890s,
but expressed in a language of partnerships and values to appease the
sensibilities of the age. Underpinned by that postmodern conceit of
"humanitarian war", it reached its emotional apogee in the vision of a
reordered world he held out to Labour's Brighton conference last
month. And so long as it is dressed up in a suitably multilateral
form, the new liberal imperialists are just as happy with
international colonial rule as their blunter rightwing counterparts.
A UN trusteeship or other multinational occupation arrangement is of
course exactly what is being prepared for the benighted people of
Afghanistan as and when US "daisy cutters" and Northern Alliance
warlords finally displace the Taliban from the rubble of Kabul and
Kandahar. We know roughly what such a setup will be like, because UN
protectorates - effectively administered by Nato and its friends - are
already functioning in Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor (in Sierra Leone,
Britain has preferred to act unilaterally). In every case, the results
have been dismal - most notably in Kosovo, where the occupation forces
have failed to prevent large-scale reverse ethnic cleansing. We have
in any case been here before. In the aftermath of the first world war,
the League of Nations handed out mandates to Britain and France to
prepare countries such as Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon for eventual
self-government. On the 80th anniversary of the Balfour declaration -
in which Britain promised to establish a national home in Palestine
for the Jewish people without prejudicing the rights of the Arab
inhabitants - it hardly needs spelling out that the long-term fallout
was calamitous.
The roots of the global crisis which erupted on September 11 lie in
precisely these colonial experiences and the informal quasi-imperial
system that succeeded them. By carving up the Middle East to protect
oil interests - as Britain did when it created Kuwait - and supporting
a string of unrepresentative client states across the region, the
western powers fostered first the nationalist and then the Islamist
backlash which now threatens them. The claim of the American political
class that the US was attacked because it stands for freedom and
democracy is more or less the opposite of the truth. In reality, the
rage driving anti-western terror is fuelled by the fact that the west
continues to deny the peoples of the area the freedom to determine
their own affairs - and has repeatedly intervened militarily across
the region to enforce its interests since the end of formal colonial
rule.
There is simply no reason to believe that what did not work and was
rejected during the colonial era will be accepted if it is dressed up
in the language of human rights, markets and the rule of law. The
19th-century imperialists did not, after all, sell themselves as
exploiters and butchers, but as a force for progress and civilisation,
bringing education, trade and religion to all - they even claimed to
be defending women's rights. The anti-colonial storm that swept away
western direct rule in the 20th century cannot be reversed. If the US
and Britain are set on a continuing course of armed intervention,
punitive sanctions and multinational colonies, that is a recipe for
indefinite war.
Blair has led Britain into four wars in four years - against Iraq,
Yugoslavia, Sierra Leonean rebels and Afghanistan. So far, British and
US casualties have been negligible. But the likely costs are now
rising. When British troops slaughtered the followers of the Mahdi in
Sudan or the Muslims of northern Nigerian a century ago, the fighting
was far from home and the colonial forces had overwhelming
technological superiority. "Whatever happens," wrote Hilaire Belloc,
"we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not." Retaliations for
colonial atrocities in the metropolitan heartland - such as the
attempted assassination in London of General Dyer, the man who ordered
the 1919 Amritsar massacre - were rare. Now all that has changed.
Since September 11, we have discovered that the empire can strike
back.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
